Quoting "Dustin J. Mitchell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 10:56 PM, Howard Sanner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:For a few weeks I've been getting unrecoverable read errors on bootup. It has only affected various printer config files, and, since I don't have a printer hooked up, that doesn't matter. I have been madly backing things up and figured I was going to have to install a new HD.These errors did not trigger an fsck?
No. Not till the occasion described.
At what stage in the boot did they occur? BIOS/POST? GRUB/LILO? Kernel startup? Or after the kernel mounts the root partition (this usually happens ~3s after the kernel messages start spewing up the screen).
They happened during the kernel messages, when the printing services were trying to be started.
The question is this: Do I have a major HD problem lurking that fsck hid, or did fsck really make the problem go away?It's certainly more likely that you have a hardware problem, although that could be something as simple as a loose cable.
I feel certain, now, that it is a hardware problem, but where in the hardware is still a question.
I tried to boot that disk last night and it sounded like it was alternately spinning up and then spinning down. The BIOS did not recognize it properly, and we never got to LILO/GRUB.
So I installed a new /dev/hda with SuSE 10 (?) installed. This booted fine and is, in fact, what I'm using right now to type this.
However, the other fly in the ointment is that the floppy drive stopped working. This was a couple days after it had last been used to make an MS-DOS boot floppy. I swapped in another drive, which worked long enough to boot DOS twice. Then it stopped, too. So I don't know if it's a cable or the disk controller (which is on the motherboard). I'm also not really sure how to test it.
Given the flaky (to be charitable) floppy, I wonder if the problem is the drive or the drive controller.
I like this computer quite a bit, mostly because it's easy to get into and swap /dev/hdb. I use it as a DAW, and audio files are big, which means several drives holding them. It isn't the expense of a new computer that's stopping me from getting one.
I would weigh the costs of downtime and a restore from backup (are you using Amanda? ;)
She said her husband wouldn't cotton to the idea. <VBG>
against the costs of a new drive and a controlled transition. I generally use LVM, so in this situation I have usually added a new (and inevitably larger) drive, pvmove'd the volumes to it, and then used the old drive as /tmp, /scratch, Amanda holding, a RAID mirror, or swap until it died. Now that I'm thinking more about green computing, my preference is to simply retire the old drive, despite its "mostly working" status.
This is waaay beyond anything I've ever done. I do have a backup of the home directories from the recently-failed /dev/hda that I can restore easily. However, I created them via cp -p to a blank /dev/hdb installed for the purpose. Real high-tech, huh? You'd never believe I used to write assembler for fun.
The only reason I haven't done this is that I actually still need to use a DOS app (Alpha 4). And for that I need a working floppy. Otherwise I'd be a totally Microsoft-free zone. <g>
Thanks. Howard Sanner [EMAIL PROTECTED]
